Kotaro Honda and Materials Research in Japan

On his return home in 1911, Honda was appointed professor of physies at the new Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, in the north of Japan this institution had been established only in 1906, when the finance minister twisted the arm of an industrialist who had made himself unpopular because of pollution eaused by his copper mines and extracted the necessary funds to build the new university. A provisional institute of physical and chemical research was initiated in 1916, divided into a part devoted to novel plastics and another to metals. This proved to be Honda s lifetime domain he assembled a lively team of young physicists and chemists. In the same year, Honda invented a high-cobalt steel also containing tungsten and chromium, which had by far the highest coercivity of any permanent-magnet material then known. He called it KS steel, for K. Sumitomo, one of his sponsors, and it made Honda famous. 

The prodigious research output of the Institute often first saw the light of day in the Science Reports of the Tohoku Imperial University, and its successors in my younger days, I received these regularly and found them rivetting reading. 

there are many eminent researchers on materials in Japan, alike in universities and in various national research institutes, and latterly in Tsukuba Science City - but the Tohoku Institute has always held a special place, owing to the energy, determination and organising ability of its founder and the habits of work which he instilled in his staff. 

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